always a code word for modifying U.S. unilateral control of Internet names and

numbers. IBSA and many others are justifiably dissatisfied with the way “enhanced

cooperation” was sloughed off by the IGF’s leadership, and turned into meaningless

happy talk about how everyone is engaging in “dialogue” post-WSIS.

A summary of the seminar by one of the participants claims

that “existing arrangements do not implement the ideal of enhanced cooperation…

Enhanced cooperation is needed as a platform to develop public policies…. The

institutional gap in policy making is currently being filled by regional and

plurilateral regulation and by self-regulation from global companies.”

But there is more to the initiative than that. The IBSA group is also interested in Internet governance’s potential, in the words of

their own statement, “to enhance IBSA’s profile as a key global player.” In

other words, IBSA wants to use the Internet governance issue to enhance its own

prestige and leadership among the world’s states.

It’s also important to take note of things that are NOT

driving this initiative. The U.S. Commerce Department has been rationalizing

its efforts to give itself and ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) more

control over ICANN by telling us that it is worried about the “political

sustainability” of ICANN. If we don’t give governments veto powers over new

domains or otherwise make ICANN kowtow to GAC, the Commerce Department tells

us, then governments will abandon the institution and possibly split the root. One could interpret IBSA's proposal as support for that thesis. I draw the exact opposite conclusion. To this observer, the IBSA proposal makes it clear that strengthening GAC will never satisfy these particular governments. IBSA does

not want more influence in an “Advisory Committee,” it wants to put governments in the driver’s

seat – and it wants that for the entire Internet, not just ICANN. IBSA is not

talking about splitting the root, it is talking about taking over the root. The

whole topic of ICANN not listening to its GAC enough does not even come up in

summaries and notes of the Rio meeting. Indeed, ICANN itself is not even

mentioned in the IBSA recommendations.

The IBSA recommendations say that “the models proposed by

the (World Summit on the Information Society’s Working Group on Internet

Governance, WGIG) provided useful guidelines” for a new global Internet

governance body. This is a false and manipulative statement. There were four

different models proposed in the WGIG report, and most of them were inconsistent

with each other. One of the WGIG proposals explicitly stated that no new global

body was needed. If IBSA is trying to pretend that its proposal has some kind

of imprimatur from the WGIG or the WSIS, no one will be fooled.The WGIG proved that IBSA-like models of governance did not command consensus, or even majority support.

I find the article over the top. However, to answer your question: Brazil's got it's multistakeholder “Internet Steering Committee”, (which was one of the hosts of the meeting that resulted in these recommendations) and which was responsible for this most excellent statement of principles:

I agree, the principles are good. But it's easy to formulate calls for wonderful things like “diversity” and “continued innovation” – it is much harder to develop and institutionalize global regimes for protecting and implementing such things.

At any rate, the Brazilian CGI is not IBSA. CGI is rooted in industry and civil society and does have governmental participation. The CGI principles are not law in Brazil and seemed to have played no role in the formulation of the IBSA plan.